At present, a short-range wireless communications technology is widely applied to various electronic devices such as smart phones, smart bands, wearable devices, and sensors. These electronic devices support a positioning technology. Positioning means implementing location positioning in an indoor environment, and is mainly implemented by using an indoor location positioning system formed by integrating multiple technologies such as wireless communications, base station positioning, and inertial navigation positioning. In addition to a cellular positioning technology of a communication network, common indoor wireless positioning technologies further include: a WIreless Fidelity (WiFi), Bluetooth, infrared, ultra wide band (UWB), radio frequency identification (RFID), ZigBee, ultrasonic wave, and the like.
The existing positioning methods are mostly performed by a mobile device-based positioning system including a Bluetooth AP and a server. In such method, positioning means that the mobile device repeatedly transmits, by using a transmission and communication network constructed by the Bluetooth AP, advertising information to the server for communication, and the server calculates according to the advertising information to obtain location information of the mobile device and sends the location information to the mobile device. Alternatively, the positioning methods are performed by an iBeacon-based Bluetooth positioning system. The positioning system includes an iBeacon information release system, an iBeacon base station, and a mobile device. The information release system includes a background management system, a service authentication interface, and a radio frequency antenna. The base station includes a data storage module and a Bluetooth radio frequency antenna. The mobile device includes a data processing module, a Bluetooth transceiver module, a wireless transceiver module, a Bluetooth radio frequency receiving antenna, and a wireless radio frequency transceiver antenna.
Many defects exist in the existing methods above: 1. A Bluetooth transmission and communication network is complex to construct and needs to deploy many Bluetooth Aps. Consequently, maintenance is inconvenient, and hardware costs are high. 2. A dedicated server is required to process data sent by a Bluetooth AP, causing data network delays and data bandwidth problems, and increasing system costs. 3. An adopted local positioning apparatus is fixed and not sufficiently flexible. Consequently, upgrade and modification of multiple positioning methods cannot be implemented. 4. Only the location of a mobile device is positioned, and a lost or hidden object cannot be positioned by using the mobile device during object search.